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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie?
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm good. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm good because.
N. Rodgers: Am generically good Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, you just stole my thunder.
N. Rodgers: No, what were you going to say?
J. Aughenbaugh: Because I was going to go ahead and say if there is a single podcast episode, that we have recorded or will do, they're probably captures me and my personality the best. It's this one, because we are covering generics.
N. Rodgers: But you know what, actually what's true about generics that is also true about you. The generics are more complicated than you first think they're going to be.
J. Aughenbaugh: Wow, you went right for the kill shot.
N. Rodgers: You are deeper than the surface. Because on the surface you're a cargo shorts where in, you're a dude who lives in a van down by the river. That thing then, but like no, there's multiple depth here because everybody thinks that a generic is just a weird like there's a generic but there isn't, there's a whole process for generics. Sorry, folks were following up with last week's FDA Food and Drug Administration, drug approval process. And we've now gotten to the magic that is generics, which I think generic maybe another term for lawsuit, in terms of like legal lease. But before we start, can we do something very briefly?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Aughie and I would like to wish Schoolhouse Rock a happy 50th birthday, because this is their 50th year. It's a callback to our early episodes where we talked about Schoolhouse Rock. But we grew up on Schoolhouse Rock, and if you try to get Aughie to say the preamble instead of sing it. Good luck because that is our childhood where you learned everything through song.
J. Aughenbaugh: Every Saturday morning. You're tuning in for the cartoons.
N. Rodgers: Yes and the commercials. The cartoons and the commercials for sugary crunchy serial.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes and Pop-Tarts and.
N. Rodgers: Hey kids ask your parents to buy this really bad food for you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which then will allow you to go ahead and save it in response to them. You should eat a breakfast. Well, I do want to eat breakfast. I want a bowl of basically sugar.
N. Rodgers: Of Chaco snap crunch, mango pops, of whatever it is with marshmallows. I'm going to watch Scooby Doo while I do that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, and after the end of every ten to 12 minute segment of Scooby-Doo, we would have Schoolhouse Rock. We learned about how.
N. Rodgers: A room, about going west. All the numbers.
J. Aughenbaugh: Numbers, conjunctions.
N. Rodgers: A figure eight. It would be great if you could make a figure eight. It's a circle that turns round upon itself. All of those songs.
J. Aughenbaugh: Conjunction, Junction [inaudible] All of them. No more kings.
N. Rodgers: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: No more kings. Wouldn't have shot heard round the world is the start of the revolution. The whole thing is, you've got history, rock, you've got math rock, you've got 0. A noun is a person, place or thing. You've got all of the grammar?
N. Rodgers: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: All that stuff. It started because of multiplication. A guy who's listening to his kids, who could sing every Rolling Stones song, but could not memorize their multiplication tables, and he went to a colleague. He was really an advertising company. He went to a colleague and said, surely there is a song that we could teach a kid. They actually wrote a song about, I want to say nine was the first one, but they knew, or maybe it's three. But anyway, he was this is it. We have to take this two, and I don't remember what channel it was on, but he took it to them and they said, Yeah, we were in.
N. Rodgers: For listeners, or for more reading.
J. Aughenbaugh: You tried to not see the preamble once you've learned it that way.
N. Rodgers: My goodness okay. For more recent listeners, those who have not been with us for the entirety of this podcast. We rather infamously did a two-part episode.
J. Aughenbaugh: About the bill.
N. Rodgers: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill, and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill.
N. Rodgers: I went ahead and ruined that particular Schoolhouse Rock video for Nia, much like I do for my intro to US government.
J. Aughenbaugh: But those are a good intro to the basics specifics, and the basics of math and the basics of grammar. We would like to wish Schoolhouse Rock a happy birthday. But now onto generics. Last time we talked about the process to get through drug to get a drug introduced to the market.
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good approval. Now you're going to talk about the people who make a copy of the drug. Yeah, because that's when a generic is. It's basically a less expensive version of whatever the named drug is.
N. Rodgers: The name brand, if you will, iteration or a version of a drug. In our last podcast episode, we talked about the various reasons why name-brand drugs might cost so much money. In what has arisen in United States and for that matter, around the world is the generic drug market. Now, let's just say for instance, Nia and I'm going to take us back to our previous episode. Nia you and I get a whole bunch of investors and we make this sarcasm reduction drug.
J. Aughenbaugh: Anti SARC?
N. Rodgers: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Anti SARC. Sounds cool. Ask your Dr. if you need anti SARC and then they would list a whole bunch of symptoms like, are you sarcastic at meetings, are you sarcastic with your family or you might enter SARC?
N. Rodgers: Yes. Do you make your dog cry?
J. Aughenbaugh: Exactly.
N. Rodgers: But.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now we have a formal drug called antisarc.
N. Rodgers: Yes. And it's on the market and it costs.
J. Aughenbaugh: It makes bazillion.
N. Rodgers: Million dollars. It costs $5,000 for a month worth of pills. But there is another drug company who was like, Hey, wait a minute here. We've looked at their patent that they filed with the US government. We think we could make this cheaper, but still make our company money. Why don't we go ahead and make a generic drug that also reduces sarcasm.
N. Rodgers: Sarcan
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah Sarcan.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, Sarcan, What's that approval process like? Well, actually, generic drug makers get to go through and this is another acronym Nia, I'm sorry. It's the abbreviated new drug application. Nia, can you guess what step? A generic drug maker gets to skip that the original drug maker has to go through.
J. Aughenbaugh: I would imagine that it's probably the most expensive part, which is the trials.
N. Rodgers: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: The clinical trials, if they're using chemicals that would have the same reaction, then they wouldn't need to prove a second time that those chemicals would have the same reactions. You'd have to be using the same basic chemicals, or they could prove that they were the same basic chemicals, but I suspect that once they do that, they don't have to do the trial and the trials can take years, that can take years off the time a drug can come tomorrow.
N. Rodgers: The development process for the brand name drug. You are correct. All a generic drug company has to demonstrate is that the same amount of their generic version gets to the bloodstream, in about the same time as the brand name drug.
J. Aughenbaugh: Does more or less the same thing.
N. Rodgers: Does more or less the same thing. They want to go ahead, and cover their butts. [inaudible] CYA. Listeners, if you've learned nothing else from this podcast know these two. Everything is rooted in the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution.
J. Aughenbaugh: The government will always cover it today.
N. Rodgers: Yes. That seems to be like a really good deal, for generic drug makers.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, this also seems like a really bad deal for Big Pharma.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, for the brands.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because they are paying a lot of money.
N. Rodgers: For the upfront, all the development.
J. Aughenbaugh: We've talked before, that's in a $2, billion dollar.
J. Aughenbaugh: They spent a significant amount of money.
N. Rodgers: That doesn't seem very fair that there can be a shortcut.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now you get to the fairness question.
N. Rodgers: By the way, listeners. Aughie hates the fairness question because I say that's not fair and he's like "Yes, but that's not the law is not about being fair man. The law It's about equal application."
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Fair is a four-letter award in the US legal regime.
N. Rodgers: I'm going to stand on my opinion though that I don't think that sounds very fair.
J. Aughenbaugh: But here's the equalizer. The company with the brand name drug. More than likely. It's not more than likely they always do. They file what application with the US federal government when they are about to market their drug.
N. Rodgers: Patent.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: This is our patented formula. That's why you always see that in old advertisements.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Patented formula for reducing carbuncles. Patented formula for what they literally mean is we went to the patent office and said, this chemical makeup is ours. We own the rights to it. Patent allows you to charge money for a thing because you own the rights to it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The idea and again, we've discussed this in a previous podcast episode, but real short, real brief. The idea behind patents is that the framers of the US Constitution wanted to encourage economic activity and creativity. They thought that one of the ways they could do this is that if you come up with a brand new way to reduce sarcasm and a whole bunch of people think that that's a great idea. You should be able to make money. Money would be an incentive for other people who want to go ahead and come up with new drugs, new manufacturing processes, new types of clothing, new types of cars, et cetera. You only get improvement when people are willing to be creative and challenge the
accepted ways of doing things. That was the logic. But the problem becomes the patent holder gets to request or require from anybody else who uses their patent, what. Money.
N. Rodgers: Money or permission, at the very least, permission.
J. Aughenbaugh: But more than likely since you're the one who spent all that time and money and coming up with a brand new drug. You're going to want what from the generic drug maker? A cut.
N. Rodgers: Absolutely.
J. Aughenbaugh: A cut.
N. Rodgers: Sure you can sell that. I'm going to need 20 percent.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. This is where things get complicated. Federal law allows generic drug companies to work on drugs to gain the abbreviated new drug approval before the patents held by the brand name companies expired.
N. Rodgers: Patents go for 20 years.
J. Aughenbaugh: Twenty years.
N. Rodgers: Twenty years so anti-sack has 20 years on the market.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: At 20 years and one day.
J. Aughenbaugh: A generic drug company could go ahead.
N. Rodgers: Can make sarcon?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Say, we can sell you that anti-sarcasm drug at half the price?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Now.
N. Rodgers: How do we keep them from doing that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Let's say we own this patent.
N. Rodgers: You and I.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes
N. Rodgers: Let's say that sarcan is owned by Bill Neumann.
J. Aughenbaugh: Neumann is going to love this.
N. Rodgers: He comes in, tries to robber baron us by taking note, tries to rob us by taking our half of our market?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: What can we do? Do we have any recourse or is it that point that the patent is done and that's too bad, he can make all the moolah he wants?
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, Neumann's got a few choices. Neumann can go ahead and say, before our patent expires, that his drug is significantly different than ours, and therefore, he does not have to honor our patent. That's one thing.
N. Rodgers: He'd have to prove that to the patent office?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Probably in a court of law some.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Because whoever loses that, if he will, administrative decision. We'll file a lawsuit in the US Patent Court. Yes folks there is actually a federal court just for patent disputes because they actually happened with some regularity.
N. Rodgers: Patents are worth a lot of money. If you're talking about pharma, you're talking about billions. Like the people who made Vioxx, the people who made, what's the drug for gentlemen cialis?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That was a money maker in a big way. They would not have wanted that undermined by anybody. Neumann tries to undermine this. We can sue him in patent court.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You can say no mine is completely different mine is made of.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Or he can go ahead and say. I did not bring my drug to the FDA until after your patent expired.
N. Rodgers: Can we renew our patent?
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: No. Once your patent expires.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: It's not like Disney where you can keep patenting the trade mark actually a trademark can be extended.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or copyrights. Because remember, as we've discussed with our colleague.
N. Rodgers: Hillary.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hillary. The United States Congress has been successfully lobbied to extend copyright protection. Ad nauseum at length.
N. Rodgers: At this point, Mickey Mouse is protected until the end of the universe. But patents.
J. Aughenbaugh: Mickey, he's been embalmed. We buried Mickey. We dug him up. We tried to bring it back to life. Disney still making money, but that's alright.
N. Rodgers: Patents are not the same. Patents cannot just be extended what you have to show with a patent though, that pattern holds true. Or its original content always.
J. Aughenbaugh: For 20 years? Yeah.
N. Rodgers: For 20 years.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Not always for 20 years. Then at the end of 20 years, then people can start messing with making quote improvements?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They can patent and improvement?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: On your patent?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Which would mean then that it is a new patents and it is their patent.
J. Aughenbaugh: But it gets even more complicated.
N. Rodgers: Of course, it does.
J. Aughenbaugh: Let's say Neumann doesn't want to wait the 20 years.
N. Rodgers: Impatient.
J. Aughenbaugh: He goes ahead and makes this makes the argument that my drug is different. Darkon is different than antisark. But we, as the patent holder of the brand name drug, can challenge his claim that his drug is different and we have 45 days to make that challenge with the FDA. Then the FDA cannot approve the drug for 30 months unless our patent expires. Or the generic drug maker in this case, Neumann wins in court.
N. Rodgers: We can slow him down for making.
J. Aughenbaugh: Slow him down big time.
N. Rodgers: From making money, we can slow him down for 30 months. But I would think that one of the things that we could sue for is if he says it's different enough, then he would need to run trials. Then we can say the FDA did not go through the proper process. He has to walk a fine line there between it's not so different that I have to run the trials, but it's different enough that I can skip the patents. You can see where this would be all about the lawyers. Yes. Then you need the best patent lawyer that you can find. I bet the best patent lawyers in the world work for big pharma?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The ones that understand the process the best, because at this point he has to walk that line and we have to prove that these crossed that line.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hey, Nia, I tell my students, current students in my law classes. If you guys want to go ahead and go to law school and make some serious money as a lawyer. Have a science background in focus on intellectual property.
N. Rodgers: You will make a zillion dollars a year.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you end up becoming an in-house counsel for a pharmaceutical company, a generic pharmaceutical company.
N. Rodgers: A tech company.
J. Aughenbaugh: A tech company where they do a lot of intellectual property and they try to get patents on all things. You're never going to have another poor day in your life.
N. Rodgers: You're also never going to have another stress free day in your life, but hey, you made that choice.
J. Aughenbaugh: But here's another complication.
N. Rodgers: Wait. If we win can we force him to give us a royalty? For every pill he sells, we get 20 percent of whatever it is that he.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Which might discourage him out of business if he was running at a super tight margin.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: If he's running at a super tight margin we might say, sure, we'll let you make that, but you got to give us 20 percent. He says I can't do that and make any money. We'll say, well too bad. That's the deal.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or, you know what else we can do Nia? You're going to love this.
N. Rodgers: Well, we could do lots of illegal things like kneecap him. We're not going to do any of that.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: We're talking legal stuff?
J. Aughenbaugh: We're talking about legal stuff. Listeners, this is going to be our segue to our next episode about the FDA drug approval process. But here's another thing that we can do Nia, as the patent holder for the brand name drug. We could pay Neumann and any other generic drug maker to delay their application to the FDA. So we can, in effect by additional years on our patent. It's called pay for delay.
N. Rodgers: If Bill Neumann were unscrupulous, which he is not. But if he were, that would actually be a great way for him to make money without having to fight in court all of the bits. If we looked at his patent and said, wow, that really is close enough. But they're not going to find that he's in violation and it's going to cost us zillions. If we knew it was going to cost us $10 billion. We could say we are better off giving him five billion to not bring it to market and still make half of what we were going to make.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Than him bring it to market and us lose the full 10 billion. We go to his company and we say, we will pay you five billion dollars to sit on this application for two years or three years or four years till we can make back that 5 billion. You'll get the money in the meantime and you can do research on other things so you can go scare other pharma.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, this is where another profession.
N. Rodgers: I can see where somebody who was, I don't carpetbagging almost.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Would do that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. And this is where another profession enters into the mix, accounts.
N. Rodgers: Lawyers in accounts.
J. Aughenbaugh: They do a cost-benefit analysis.
N. Rodgers: How much is it going to cost us to pay Bill Neumann? Then they come to you and they say, as the owners of this patent, we are telling you that it is cheaper for you to pay Bill Neumann two billion dollars to sit on that application for five years than it is for you to fight him in court because it costs this much for the lawyers, this much for this, this much for this, and you're probably going to lose.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: See if you'll take the deal.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because accounts would say to you and me, as the owner of the brand name drug Pat. You're scientists basically concluded that Neumann's going to get approval from the FDA. Your patent expires at the end of the year. You're only going to get profits until the end of the year. But if Neumann's company is willing to accept a two billion dollar payment. He agrees not to go ahead and produce his generic version, say for five years, we can guarantee you guys our models will have predicted that you guys are going to see $10 billion in additional profits. That's a four-to-one ratio.
N. Rodgers: It's better to pay him.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Then there are critics who say, but that stifles competition because we've effectively bought off.
N. Rodgers: Then harms consumers. Because consumers are still having to pay for the brand name.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Drug, as opposed to the generic drug. Generic drugs are almost always less expensive, which is the whole point of a generic drug. Is that when you say to your doctor that's great. But can I take a generic for this thing? A lot of times your doctor will say, yes, there's one available and it's at a third of the price or its half of the price. Technically you're creating a monopoly when you do that when you buy off the other companies and say, we just need you to hold off for a couple of years. We just need you to hold off for five years.
J. Aughenbaugh: What's interesting Nia, you brought up a potential way for the government to make those pay-for-delay arrangements less attractive, i.e, bringing anti-trust lawsuits. But what's interesting is it's not the anti-trust department of the Justice Department. It's been the Federal Trade Commission. Did I say something that was funny?
N. Rodgers: No. The reason I'm laughing is, sorry, I was laughing silently for those who could not hear my silent laughter is because this is another instance where the government is supposed to encourage a thing and discourage a thing at the exact same time, different parts of the government. The FDA is like, yes, bring your drug to market so that we can have less sarcasm in the classroom. That's fabulous. The Trade Commissioners say, yeah, be careful about being the only drug on the market who does that and steps on the neck of other people because we really want there to be capitalism. Because capitalism only works if there's multiple choices in the market. The market drives success as opposed to, you drive success by driving your competitors.
J. Aughenbaugh: Out of the market. You've gotten so big that nobody is willing to go ahead and take you on. There are no Neumann's out there who are willing to say, hey, we can make a drug cheaper that does the same thing. Would that be great? The FDA is just like, hey, wait a minute. We've already approved a drug to market. It's reducing sarcasm. We've done our job. We made sure that the drug was safe. It did what it was supposed to, and the side effects aren't all that great. Nobody dies from taking.
N. Rodgers: Death is not listed. Except in extreme circumstances.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. But the Federal Trade Commission's like wait a minute, that's an unfair trade practice. Rogers Aughenbaugh or basically trying to corner the market on reducing sarcasm. We don't do that in a capitalist society. You're not supposed to do that.
N. Rodgers: This is the fundamental problem with the federal government of the United States.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Is that there's almost always a guy who's telling you to go for it and there's almost always a guy who's telling you just stop.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You have to decide who's going to punish you more, in what terrible ways.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is where the lawyers, the accountants, and the economists weigh in.
N. Rodgers: Try to figure out where the lines are with, well, let's go in this direction and do this thing and it should satisfy The Trade Commission. But we also want to maintain our patent and our holdover over this medical device or pill or whatever. I'm chuckling because always is like there is nothing in the federal government that you do that one agency is not slightly affected by the work of another agency. Like it's all so inner agency. The only groups that don't work together like that, are intelligence. Which you would think they would. But everybody else there this weird, like for instance, so Neumann sues us and Neumann wins. He gets to bring his generic to market.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But then his generic drug kills people. Who gets sued because he didn't do the trials?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, he does and the FDA's hands are clean.
N. Rodgers: But the FDA is embroiled in the idea of you didn't make him go through the trials.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. The FDA has no authority to do so because Congress wanted to encourage who to bring other drugs to the market. Generic drug companies. Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, it's one of those gaps in the authorizing legislation for the FDA.
N. Rodgers: Here's what happens. Neumann's drug starts to kill people. Neumann goes out of business because that's what's going to happen. There is no one for you to sue.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's correct.
N. Rodgers: You can't sue the original maker because they're like, that's not you and I, we're all just talking about, you weren't taking our drug. We didn't have anything to do with this. The FDA is like, no they met all the criterion. Neumann met all the criteria for our abbreviated new drug. Sorry, you're out of luck.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's a hole.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a huge hole and it's one of the controversies about the FDA's approval process. On the other hand, and we'll get to other controversies in the next episode but to conclude this episode. But on the other hand Nia if the FDA required generic drug companies to go through the same approval process-
N. Rodgers: Holy cow, nobody would ever bring anything to market because they would be spending the same money that big pharma is spending in, there wouldn't be any savings. Generics would not cost less, they would cost the same as.
J. Aughenbaugh: There is a disincentive.
N. Rodgers: Why would you do that? I wouldn't do that. If I was Bill Neumann and they said to me, but you have to go through the trial process I'd be like screw that. I'll just go do something else or I'll make a different drug. If I have to go through that full process, I might as well also be making the money from the patent and the whole.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, the brand new drug.
N. Rodgers: You would discourage that market.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Then briefly, can we talk about, and I don't want to get into this too far, but there are occasions when we have the government step in and pay for research. We saw that during the COVID vaccine. We've seen that in other vaccines where the government has stepped in and funded that research, and you made an interesting point, and now I'm starting to really put it together, sorry, it takes me a little while, you made an interesting point way back when we were talking about COVID, that one of the reasons that the Trump administration put money into every single drug company that it could find, including me and you who didn't have one practically, everybody got money from them was somebody's got to get there whoever gets there we want to make sure that they have enough funding to get there. I'm not entirely certain that Donald Trump has gotten credit for that. That was an investment in American health and safety. That was his administration saying, we will throw money at every single person who has even the closest chance of getting this and by that I mean, a lot of the big pharmas got money. Some it didn't work and some it did. But that's the money that you spend trying to get to the purpose that you're trying to get to. I know for listeners who are not huge Donald Trump fans, one has to say, but he did what businessmen do, which is throw money at that problem until somebody solves it. If you got five guys in the room, is almost like the apprentice, you got like guys in the room throw 100 million in it at all five guys and see who can get there and who got there were Pfizer Johnson & Johnson and Moderna. Then some of the others were like, sorry, we're not going to get there. We're not going to be able to get there in time or we're not going to be able to make a dent in the need or whatever. But that's still money well-spent because that was an emergency response.
J. Aughenbaugh: It was emergency response but it's also a good example of how expensive making drugs actually is.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, because I think their administration put 100 million into each of those companies.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, there was no guarantee that any of those drug companies were going to be able to go ahead and come up with a safe effective vaccine. Much of this is a crapshoot. You're just like the
lights are out you're shooting in the dark and you're hoping that you're going to go ahead and hit something. But it requires a lot of money; the materials, the chemicals, the compounds, generally expensive. You're talking about high-end talent in terms of people.
N. Rodgers: That's a Nobel Prize winners working on stuff like this or people who run in those circles. This is not me with a chemistry set from Walmart. No offense to Walmart, but Walmart and I could not have done this.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is not a Saturday morning sign show on PBS.
N. Rodgers: I'm not Bill Nye, but I'm not sure he could have come up with a vaccine.
J. Aughenbaugh: He might be able to explain why the vaccine is working in terms of grading the vaccine. You and I aren't going to go ahead and do this on a Saturday morning as a kids craft project.
N. Rodgers: You have to be prepared for failure and whatever else one may say about the Trump administration, they were okay with having some of it fail. He is a businessman, understood that if he was going to throw money in all directions, some of those directions would fail. That's what you have to do in order to get success. I do think that there is a place for the government in encouraging certain.
J. Aughenbaugh: Why drug research makes lot of sense when you know you have a particular public health problem and it's not going to get any better unless the government brings money and a fair amount of public pressure into the mix because let's face it, did you want to be one of those drug companies that said, we're not interested in receiving $100 million from the federal government to go ahead and help out. Potentially over 330 million people were just not interested.
N. Rodgers: It's not really our thing. Excuse me.
J. Aughenbaugh: Your mission statement on your website.
N. Rodgers: Doing good around the world, laugh with people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, we're here and we help. All of that gets washed away when you go ahead and say, we ain't going to help out. Hey, but thanks for the offer. Hugs and kisses.
N. Rodgers: XOXO.
N. Rodgers: Almost defunct pharma company.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, big pharma.
N. Rodgers: That's not what they did. What I think is interesting too about that is, and the ones that failed were not punished in any way.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: Because you don't punish people for trying. If they were making a good faith effort, which they were and they had to prove, I'm sure they were audited within an inch of their existence. They showed that they were making a good faith effort unlike that snake in the grass, Neumann, who's trying to steal our patent.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, listeners.
N. Rodgers: I say it totally with love in our hearts because we are both quite fond of Bill Neumann.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is going to be [inaudible]
N. Rodgers: What did I do to you?
J. Aughenbaugh: When he finds out that we went ahead and used them in hypothetical lot of our podcast episodes because we didn't plan this, nor did we get pre-approval.
N. Rodgers: His permission. That's right. Sorry, Dr. Neumann. We know that you're not evil.
J. Aughenbaugh: Back to the COVID-19. Here's the other interesting thing. You're talking about the pharmaceutical companies getting audited to an inch of their life of all of the COVID-19 money that the federal government spent. I think it's noteworthy that heretofore, I'm unaware of any press reports saying that there was fraud in the money the federal government spent on COVID-19 vaccines. Compared to all of the other COVID-19 money that got distributed.
N. Rodgers: Holy cow, and got fraudulently used in borrowed, my gosh. The money that went to small businesses that now they're finding out didn't and where they were trying to pay workers and say, okay, all of that went south. We're going to at some point there will be a COVID-19 commission.
J. Aughenbaugh: Other hospitals.
N. Rodgers: That commission will have to do a basically an audit of all that money and all the choices that were made. Some of which were good, some of which were bad. We're finding out now that children are two, and three, and four levels behind in school. There's all kinds of fallout from this. There's going to need to be a commission report. I, by the way, do not want to be in charge of that commission and just in case President Biden's folks are listening. I am not interested in being on that commission or in charge of that commission, but I would nominate Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: What did I do to you?
N. Rodgers: Good response. I actually think you'd be very thorough on one of those commissions. You know what I mean. You have that administrative law mind where you'd be like, okay, let's look at what we did and what the cause is three years down the road and how did we win or lose? You're not an
accountant, but you do a really good job of that benefit risk analysis. It probably comes from, in part, years of administrative law and in part years of being the chair of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, this idea of risk management. But there will have to be a commission at some point.
J. Aughenbaugh: In previous life, I was a bureaucrat and let's face it, if you've ever had to go ahead and manage a budget for a federal government agency you really get good at certain things even if you don't want to be.
N. Rodgers: But I'm going to put to you that I think the reason that the money that went to big pharma is pretty much not being questioned, is because everybody was staring at big pharma for weeks. The news kept showing up at big pharma headquarters and saying, do you have it yet? It's like kids in the backseat of your car. Are we there yet? I think they were under enormous pressure, but also enormous scrutiny at the time. I think that's probably in part why their books are so clean on this topic. Probably cleaner than they would normally be. I'm not saying pharma steals money from the government because I don't think they do for the most part. There are some creeps in pharma and we're going to talk about controversies and I want to get to that insulin guy because I have feelings about him, not insulin.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're talking about the EpiPen?
N. Rodgers: Yes, and the expense of the EpiPen going through the roof. Are you nuts? And the Hep-C guy, Brian, I'm going to charge $700 for this. No, you're not anyway. But those are going to come next episode. But I will be interested to see how long it takes for us to get a commission on that. But you know what I would not be in charge. Now I've discovered a couple of things. I wouldn't be in charge of in the federal government. One of them is the FDA because this is a tough. Like the one side of I want to save these lives and I want to help people who have this medical condition that's dire, and I want to help them feel better and have their health improved, and the other side, it is so easy for drugs to kill people. It's so easy for drugs to go wrong. I just don't know that I could I think I would lay in bed at night all the time with my eyes open, thinking, this is terrible. I'm going to make a bad choice here and people are going to die. I appreciate that the doctors and the scientists there do the best they can with what they have because they don't always know how this is going to turn out. We're going to get to that with controversies too. Thank you, Aughie. This has been interesting with it so we've established two things. One, we should hire lawyers if we're ever going to make drugs and we've established that we got to watch out for snakes like Bill Neumann, who are going to try to steal our patent as soon as they can and make money off of our hard work. I see how it is.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, Neumann is going to be so surprised when I go ahead and tell him.
N. Rodgers: You said you're a snake. Why did I do to Neumann? Thank you, Aughie
J. Aughenbaugh: Thanks, Nia. Bye.
N. Rodgers: Bye.
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